The Indian Institutes of Technology are considering putting off their MTech admission schedule to June-July starting next year to stem the trend of students securing PSU jobs and dropping out weeks after joining the master’s programme.

Currently, the IITs admit MTech students in May. Many of them get recruited by the public-sector undertakings in July-August and quit the institutes.

An average of 10 to 25 per cent MTech students have tended to drop out in the past four years, RTI replies sent by the tech schools to a student, Niladri Bihari Mishra, show. In IIT Kanpur in 2016, the dropout rate was 121 out of 288, or 42 per cent.

Human resource development ministry officials on Monday met several IIT directors and PSU chairpersons to work out a solution. No final decision was taken but some of the ideas mooted were:

The PSUs will consider wrapping up recruitment by June-July, advancing the process by about a month.

To make this possible, the IITs will try to publish the results of the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), through which they admit their MTech students, in February (they now do so in March). This is because the PSUs recruit engineers on the basis of their GATE scores.

If the proposed system of the IITs and the PSUs conducting their admissions and recruitments simultaneously in June-July is to yield results, they have to share information.

The IITs have asked the PSUs to join their Common Offer Acceptance Portal (COAP) — where all these premier tech institutes share their MTech admission details — and upload the details of the candidates they would be recruiting.

If the admission and recruitment data are shared on the COAP, students would have the option of choosing between the job and the master’s programme. This will help reduce vacancy.

A suggestion that the PSUs advance their recruitment to May was shot down, prompting the IITs to decide to consider postponing their MTech admissions to June-July instead.

“Some of the PSUs use the candidates’ BTech results as an eligibility criterion for the job interview. Since the IITs declare their BTech results around June, the PSUs said it would not be possible to advance their recruitment process to May,” IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi told The Telegraph.

Among the PSUs that attended Monday’s meeting were Rashtriya Ispat Nigam, Nuclear Power Corporation of India, Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers, Bharat Petroleum, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd, Hindustan Petroleum, Power Grid Corporation, Steel Authority of India, Airport Authority of India, Bharat Heavy Electricals, Indian Oil Corporation and National Aluminium Company Ltd.